Western Short StoryThe Pumquich ThieveryTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

English Wells
fought the Pumquich River for more than thirty years, moving his will
ever by degrees at it. “By God, Miriam,” he often said to his
wife, “I’ll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work
for, you get. You get what you work for.” English, lacking funds or
worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the
river, to push his small estate, his limited gardens,
into the river’s run, to claim energy’s due.

“The two of us,”
she’d say, partners to the end, the crochet needle at a small and
quick twist in her hand, or a sewing needle making code against her
fingers. At such watch her nose would announce when the pie in the
oven was ready, or a roast in its own rank of juice. English always
noted her almost inert actions, the messages driven home by them, and
said the best things said were often unsaid. These days, he thought,
she had become, for whatever, rounder and more content.

On the same hand,
by its gifts, the Pumquich was magnanimous, an opulent river, a river
that slipped unheralded out of the far country in various disguises.
Furtive, escapee, melodious in turns it was, ever twisting or dancing
on the face of Earth. At first a placid no-nonsense runner, gaited by
life, it never ran out of normal breath. Then for a hectic bit it
came a robust galavanter in those wild, robust places where hideaways
gleamed their darkness among harshest rocks and vertical cliffs old
as time itself. And now, decoded and broken into a lesser tributary
by Earth’s curves, sleepily at times under alder-branched archways
where fishermen lurked, near breathless but ongoing in the way of
rivers, it dared come past English Wells. For those forty years he
had gone without pause in his evening labors, after a regular day’s
work as a truck driver, most lately on his own 14-wheel rig, bigger
than the house. And Miriam, on those evenings after work, watched him
from the window or the porch of that small bungalow, no children ever
at her feet or at beck and call, saying, “You go about your work,
English. We have no call on us otherwise.”

There, for the
nonce, in this one man and his patient, supportive wife, the Pumquich
seemed to have met a match.

Miriam dwelled on
him from odd angles; saw him broad, thick-browed, his deep brown eyes
often at repose even when he was at labor, his energy seeming to leap
from a reservoir she thought had no end. She’d see him at the very
edge of the riverbank he was always moving, or attempting to move.
English would look back on his property, at the peach and pear and
apple trees marching in ranks down to the river with him, and random
but deep green clutches of grapevines that joined the slow march
outward, his invasion. She mused he was a mathematician at a
problem’s resolution.

The measurement,
his own planning with fruits of geometric concentration, almost
overpowered him. Stabbed with accomplishment, Miriam heard, time and
again, his confidential but tempering aside; “Them peaches keep
pushing me, Miriam. Damned if they don’t.” He’d look outward,
and continue, “On the other side, over there by them muddy spots,
it’s too damn low for any use. If I can stretch our piece of land a
foot at a time, we just plain get bigger. It’s really that simple.
And them at the town hall can’t plot the river’s line, but just
obey every turn it makes.”

To his liking, she
phrased her comments or replies in a turn at formality and a bit of
elegance. “You carry on, English, early when the sun leaps like a
jumper. Or the moon later on, tired of repose or isolation in
darkness, breaks loose of the horizon. Oh, like a prisoner from his
cell, my river thief.” The roundness hugged him.

With a new neighbor
at a kaffeklatsch, English off on his regular job, Miriam said, “At
first English makes a small dent in the Pumquich’s passage to the
sea six miles down, hoping always by some miracle to bend its course
forever in one night. He’ll build a wall of sorts against the
river’s flow, backfill it, and start anew, all by a measured
degree… rock by rock, stone by stone, shovelful by shovelful, or
eventually by the third generation of his new wheelbarrow. Granite,
big or small, in all its beauty, is moved with a loving care.
Sandstone and mica are nursed into place as well. Boulders beget him,
I swear, fused by some old glacier hereabouts. English, in this
trade-off, never knows how much sweat his body gives back.” She
paused, sipped her coffee and added, “And he never counts.”

It was simply one
of his old saws that came repeated in another voice: “Hell, Miriam,
all it takes is energy, and I got a ton of that.” She knew all of
them, the one full page.

The weight of the
statement, fully defined and worldly, fell off his shoulders, like a
slab of rock off a Pumquich cliff far up the river. His thumb was as
green as ever, but he wanted a wider orchard, a bigger claim. “My
sweat demands it,” he would say, “and that force pounding in me,
needing to move the very Earth itself.”

“English,” she
would say, “you’re more than ever at your significant work.”
Her blue eyes shone their lamps on him, the needle in her fingers
working that tactile code.

At the same time
Miriam loved the slight smile at the corners of his mouth when he
made his honest pronouncement, as if he thought he was sharing a
secret she had not known. Her needle, or the crochet hook, would go
its merry way, which English saw and took for punctuation of sorts.

Pointing out a
rock or boulder he was hustling, he’d yell up at Miriam at her
favorite window or at her favorite chair on the porch. “This rock
might become a keystone, or this boulder the base of a pillar.”
There was reality in his proposition. Sunset glazed his sweaty
forehead.

Then he’d shove
his shoulder against the monster or wedge a bar beneath what only a
glacier might last have moved, the glacier long ago calving the rock
and the land into a lake of deposits, it seemed. Never had he been a
serious student of Earth’s history, but nevertheless felt it tremor
through his arms every day with his efforts; the shiver, the shunt,
the movement, Earth on the slow prowl, reforming.

Miriam could not
count the hours English had spent down there at the back of
the house, with pick and shovel and barrow, nor counted his trips
with donated fill dumped practically at their door; he had his own
designs on what should go where. It was not that he was an engineer,
she had convinced herself as well as he had, but certain things would
last longer than others in the continual wash the river exerted and
the drainage plying storm after storm across the land. Over the years
he had developed his own laboratory for tests, calculated the
results, planned the future moves.

Neighbors dropped
their excess fill at the rear end of his driveway. Rocks, old stone
walls, parts of foundations. Rock gardens, suddenly flattened out to
choicer lawns, came trundled onto his property. English would accept
only that which was natural; no junk, no plastic, nothing that would
take a thousand years to get back to its original properties. He
could have accepted Hank Patterson’s old Ford, because Hank had
proposed its use. English could have loaded it with brick and stone
that it would keep in place for years, a miniature chunk of
breakwater, until it rusted out. He did not take it.

“Hank, I know
you’re trying to do what you can, but this move of mine is for
keeps, and I won’t really try to screw up the river or the land,
other than just letting it mosey a bit. I know iron was here ever
before I started, but I’ll not add it, or any plastic either. None
of that new stuff that never lets go.”

“English,”
Miriam argued, “You could start a new wall with that car sunk in
place. You could roll it over and drop it right where you need it
most. It’s a sure way to make a bottle cap.” She felt she was
trying to shorten his task; to see his dream done sooner; his place
in the physical world marked off forever.

And so it went on
for those years. English would handle shovel or barrow, she would
cook or sew or bring a book of poems beside the window. She was
content with him, life was sure, smooth, promised tomorrow on the
plate. He’d wave the shovel at her, or the huge, rock-ribbed pick
ax, with the shades of evening coming down on them. She’d wave
back, in that gentle way she had, a book or the invisible needle in
her fingers. Either was enough for English. She’d be there after
the day’s last shovelful was flung or the last rock dropped into
place. As rich as the Pumquich, she was. No other man could be so
lucky.

From her spot at
the window, she believed the span of his shoulders could support the
world, and she knew the promising shadow those shoulders threw coming
into the bedroom at night, his labors done, the next drive at hand.
Never had she said welcome, though she could have, but threw the
covers back for him every time, the white shank of her thigh like an
exclamation mark. She thought it not lascivious, but part of her
total need for him. And he thought she was beautiful at cover
tossing, poetry in motion. English could have said so, but he didn’t.
They had always passed on the pillow small talk, their energies
matched and compensated. Morning was often the next thing they knew.

Shadows, though, as
in all of life, were like hands reaching to grasp one another, or
take them in; though these mates knew the distance between shadows
was covered with good ground.

The one dark shadow
in all of it that came at Miriam, out of context or kilter, was who
would, in the end of it all, come into ownership of all his labor.
Even with no children of their own, it still would not be fair for
the town to end up with forty years or more of English’s work.

That shadow,
though, lingered for her. Often she thought it like a forgotten meal
reinventing itself on the palate at the strangest hour, a gourmet
roast, a dry and irresponsibly memorable red wine. The taste was
there, even if phantom.

The 4th
of July bomb came into their lives, bursting from the shadow.
Miriam’s sister Georgette and her husband Paul Linkard were
obliterated in a head-on crash with a gas tanker truck in a night
rain storm as they came from the wake of a neighbor woman. Georgette
had ironically serviced the woman through a difficult health issue.
The sole child of the Linkard union was 5-year old Paul Linkard, Jr.
Shortly he was the responsibility of his Auntie Miriam, or, as his
mother used to say, Auntie Em.

Now Miriam had her
own task; at her age to get this child to some kind of maturity so
that he could function in the world. English had his river, she had
this child. And, as with all things emanating from shadows, the
changes came. Exhaustion came early at her in her new days, the day
full of running, doing, getting done, chasing down the child. And
taking care of her man.

The first night the
covers were not thrown back on the bed, and Miriam deep into a
demanding sleep, English Wells knew, even with the river still
running, that life had changed.

Paulie drew at him
as well, the towheaded smiler locking up a new place in his heart.
Nights Miriam’s hand flopped innocently against English, and fell
away. He thought of the river again, as a kind of lover, making
demands, giving parts away, taking them back. He tried to think of
some line of poetry she had read during one of the other days,
days before Paulie. As always, he could not bring it back, knowing
each verse was but momentary in him. Sleep, in its stead, came in
reward.

And it was Paulie
who came screaming out of the deeper yard one evening when English
was pinned in the water by a boulder. Miriam screamed at neighbors.
Two men leaped down the yard in bounds to find English caught between
the boulder and the last wall he had built and the river washing over
him. One of them, Patterson himself, wedged the long crowbar in place
and freed English from certain death. Waskovitch pressed on English’s
stomach to push the river free of its claimant. English gagged and
gasped and gave mouthfuls of water back.

Neighbors thought
English would give up his quest, and Miriam for a few nights was back
to her cover-tossing, but the river continued, and so did English
Wells until the night, beside her man in a sudden stillness, him cool
as the river, Miriam Wells knew one journey was over.

Evenings
occasionally, Paulie leaping upwards and off to another school,
Miriam Wells waves an invisible needle or a twig-like crochet needle
out the window or from the depths of the porch. One night, nearly
inaudible, she read a line of poetry into a small patch of darkness
at the edge of the river: Once, near thirteen, we shared/a
cigarette under cover of the mist/and the alewives passed us,
upstreaming./That’s the night we forgot to listen./That’s the
night we began.

It was the only
secret she had kept from English, her own poem, and that night in the
soft darkness she let go of it forever.